Max Ajl

In our moment, questions and quandaries of land, revolutionary nationalism, the frictions and convergences of struggle in the core and the periphery, and finally what forms of struggle – in the most literal sense – can make a world big enough for everyone, find one of their most vivid and inspiring contemporary experiments in Jackson, Mississippi. There, the organizing of Coöperation Jackson, which has sought to build political power, economic autonomy, and eco-socialism, invites us to consider simmering questions of transition, organization, and strategy as they exist today. The publication of Jackson Rising, a book on their ongoing struggles, allows us to do so in the spirit of political experimentation and the utopian vision necessary for this task.

Ayeb’s focus is the struggles of direct producers who work in agriculture in a natural world beset by the dislocations and mounting disorders of agro-industrial capitalist farming. Through interviews, he assembles an anecdotal yet accurate account of Tunisia’s rural productive system, a collage of testimony and analysis.